A person of consequence replied to your post on Skype:
He's a bit late; there's no one around that cares anymore.
The ones that did care lost interest due to all the effort and troubles it costs just to help.
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Dear Fallacy
Being the spammer on watch, i shall first try to answer your questions:
Yes, there are stats on savagexr.com. I do not exactly know to what extent. Tirza (H3027) should be able to help.
This section,
http://www.newerth.com/smf/index.php/board,187.0.html or
that thread may shed some light.
We don't have full control over the legal rights, apparently. I say apparently because (also not my domain) S2Games rejected our request to allow us to add Savage XR to steam. This right here will probably make you drop the whole thing.
We have published it on Desura though, Humble Bundle (and other such systems afaik).
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Now, i love a hot debate as much as the next guy
. But don't think we don't know what put us in our particular predicament.
1. Savage never was a "consumer" game. It requires insane amounts of skill to hold your own on the battlefield. The longer the game goes on, the harder for any new player to be able to play without being instantly killed. Horribly. Over and over again. Hundreds, if not thousands of times until they manage to get a certified, proper kill of their own.
2. Related to the one above, like everything else actually: Savage's learning curve is so steep they should invent a word for it. And there's no way you can be helped, there really is. Although some players, i dare say many, try and help newcommers, there's rarely anybody tough enough to stay and learn while feeding the enemy around the clock.
3. Why no newbie servers, you ask? Well, there's an answer to that. Or 4.
- Since newbies don't stick around long, we don't have enough newbies to offer proper games to the other newbies that land. And fighting bots is... fighting bots in the age of MMOs.
- Even when there were servers with what you could call newbie-friendly settings, playing on those servers, even a little, would have made you irrecuperable so that when you hit the standard servers, you would just die. Horribly. Repeatedly.
- Veterans. Assholes bypassing handicaps, account filters, common sense, just to join these servers and murderize newbies all day long. Or night, depending on the time zone.
- Why not change the settings game-wide so they're more newbie-friendly? WELLLL... first, because change in large amounts would make XR end up like Savage 2 (RIP), which... yew... and 2nd, because change, even in small amounts, would reactivate vets. That don't even play more than a few games per year. Read below.
4. Well, veterans. Many people that stayed only did it because they were good and pwning made them feel good. Change a tiny teensie itsy-bitsy wee little thing that affects their style and proficiency and you'll get your ass handed to you. Hate choir. But i seriously cannot blame them. They like something, well, they want to play it for as long as it takes for them to be sick of it, not having to leave their comfort zone and start learning new tricks. That's why i keep making patches too!
5. Everyone has an opinion, not just the vets. Every single head out there believes their way is the best way to balance, advance or simply fix this game. Not only hardcore XR gamers. That makes it very hard for any single change to be accepted. Took 4 years for the players resistance to new things to wear out and be able to bring minute changes to standard mod! YEARS! I'm not talking like one that's trying to freshen up the game a little, and have put hundreds if not thousands of hours into it, which i did. I'm just stating facts. So, if things don't change, people will eventually get bored, having nothing new to discover and re-kindle their interest, especially since they do not welcome such things.
6. The current state of the game: terribly deprecated. Although undoubtedly incomparably in better shape than its vanilla version (shaders, hundreds of new and improved graphics and props, revamped hi-res interface, auto-updater, tutorials, thousands of fixed issues and bugs, great new functionality, stats and integration - please read this
cinemablend report), it still looks aged. That'll make kids these days click Quit faster than Savage 2 players
.
7. Why not make it better then? The balancing/changes part is already discussed. Not much need for coding new stuff, but even so, this right here is what many dozens of contributors managed to achieve. There's nobody willing to work for free AND able to come up with high quality contributions. There were quite a few, but their interest was rather short-lived, or RL took precendence. Even so, we're miles away from vanilla Savage 1. Incredible effort has already been put in by teams producing EX2, SEP then later SFE and XR mods. 2 years ago almost to the day, the game was
released. For the few people that played it, by the few people that made it. All gone now.
8. But certainly, efforts can be made and the ever-so-important promotion across game portals, forums, social media, youtube, in order to inject new blood into a decrepit body... Well, commendable performances have been seen from some relentless guys like Tirza/H3027 which spent thousands of bucks of her own money, or APirateHat the reddit guru. My personal opinion is that we would probably never have gotten this far without them, but the reasons above heavily impeded their effectiveness.
9. The obvious issue of "other games". There are quite a few people obsessed with Savage, but by god, there comes a time you need to go someplace else and play something new.
and lastly, 10. The negativity of the forums is undeniable and each and every one of us shares a part of the guilt. Not many people used to read it, compared to how many just played the game. Nowadays, we're all around and chatting, be it here on the forum, or ingame, while spectating
. Newerth turned into a big chatroom.
I hope that saves you at least some of the trouble of having to criticize everything
.
Author
